Boring.

Did you make any other friends?

Not really. I tried to find a bad crowd to fall in with, but Carlotta with her sugar Pall Malls was the closest thing to a real j.d. that the place had to offer. Most of the other kids, I don’t want to say they were dumb hicks, but they were dumb hicks. So I stuck with Carlotta, and we made our own fun.

And did this fun include amateur detective work?

Not deliberately. You’re talking about the janitor, right? Me getting wise to him, that was mostly an accident.

What happened?

The school was only running at about sixty percent capacity, so to save money, an entire wing of the building had been closed down. The closed wing was officially off-limits, but of course that was just an invitation for students to try and break in; Carlotta and I had already talked about getting a crowbar from the gas station so we could go exploring.

Then one afternoon I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the janitor open up one of the connecting doors that led into the closed wing. He went inside and pulled the door shut behind him, but I didn’t hear him relock it. It seemed like a golden opportunity; I almost ran back to the library to get Carlotta, but then I thought about it a little more and realized that it was maybe more than one kind of opportunity.

See, one thing I was definitely missing in Siesta Corta was dope. And it was making me crazy, because I was in the middle of goddamned farm country, and I knew people had to be growing it. But nobody would tell me who. Carlotta was no help; the only controlled substance that ever passed her lips was communion wine, and not much of that. I had higher hopes for Felipe, but when it came to drugs he turned out to be even more straitlaced than his sister. The one time I tried to raise the subject with him he just gave me the evil eye.

You thought you might have better luck with the janitor?

Sure. I mean, four o’clock in the afternoon, the guy goes into an abandoned part of the building. What for? Not to mop floors. And he wasn’t carrying any tools, so he couldn’t be doing repairs. So what’s that leave?

Any number of things, I’d imagine. But I take it you were hoping for vice?

You bet I was. And we’re talking about a young guy with long hair and a Jesus beard. So what kind of vice was he likely to be into?

But it wasn’t what you thought.

No, actually, it was what I thought. It’s just, it was also more than what I thought.

Past the connecting door was a long hallway lined with empty classrooms. The janitor was in the last room on the left, but halfway down the hall I could already smell the pot. Good stuff, too—he obviously knew the right people. So I tiptoed down there, trying to work out how to play this. I figured I could either go in casual and friendly—“Hey, can I get a hit off that?”—or I could be a hard-ass and threaten to turn him in if he didn’t give me his whole stash.

Which approach did you decide on?

I couldn’t make up my mind. I didn’t know the guy at all, right, so I had no idea how easily he’d scare, or share. And meanwhile—I was standing right outside the room, now—I started hearing these monkey noises.

Monkey noises?

Yeah. Literal monkey noises, I thought at first, like maybe he had a pet chimp in there with him. Farfetched, I know, but who can tell with pot-smokers? So I took a peep around the doorframe to see what kind of sideshow I was about to burst in on.

The janitor was over by the windows. He had a telescope set up, and his face was mashed down over the eyepiece like it had been glued there. His left arm was curved above his head, like this, holding a joint in the air, and his right arm was curved down towards his waist, like this, holding…Well, I couldn’t see exactly what he was holding, for which thank God, but from the way his elbow was pumping it wasn’t hard to guess.

As for the monkey noises, that was actually two sounds in one. He was grunting, of course, but also, to sort of brace himself, he’d pulled a pupil’s chair up sideways behind him and planted his butt on the armrest, and the feet of the chair were going squeak-squeak-squeak in time with the grunts: voilà, instant chimp sounds. Which, all things considered, wasn’t too far off the mark.

So I’m watching this, and I’m like, yuck, but at the same time, I still really wanted some dope. I definitely had the goods to blackmail this guy now, but the idea of confronting him in the act was too gross to contemplate, so I decided to wait him out and see if he’d leave the roach behind when he was done with his business. That was something Moon and I used to do at her parents’ parties, go around collecting leftovers out of the ashtrays and recycling them into bong hits. It was a great way to get high without actually having to talk to any freaks.

I hid in another classroom across the hall and prayed for a quick finish. The monkey noises got louder—they were more gorilla than chimp towards the end—and then there was a bang as the desk fell over, then silence, and then, very faint, the zip of a zipper. And then footsteps, going out and down the hall, not running but hurrying, like he’d suddenly remembered an appointment he had to get to.

When I was sure the coast was clear I came out of hiding. I was out of luck on the dope: he’d left something behind, all right, but it wasn’t marijuana.

I took a look through the telescope to see what he’d been spying on. I was expecting the girls’ locker room, something like that, but the guy’s tastes turned out to be weirder than I’d thought. The telescope was aimed at this little picnic area about a quarter mile south of the school. It was nothing fancy, just a turnaround by the side of Route 99 with some wooden tables and a tire swing. The place doubled as a make-out spot, and on a Friday or a Saturday night I suppose there’d have been plenty to keep a Peeping Tom interested, but at the moment the only people there were this tourist family: Mom, Dad, two boys, a golden retriever, and an RV plastered with Disneyland stickers.

I didn’t see the attraction. I mean, there’s no accounting for perverts, but this family just didn’t strike me as, you know, masturbation material. So I was trying to puzzle it out—was it the mom that turned him on? Was it the dog? — when I heard a door slam. And I’m like, oh crap, he’s coming back, but it wasn’t the door in the hall, it was the school’s front door. I looked out the window and saw the janitor down in the parking lot. He walked over to this brown van, got in, started up the engine…and just sat there, idling.

Then after another minute I noticed smoke wafting out of the driver’s-side window: the son of a bitch had fired up another joint. That got me mad, because I was already thinking of it as my dope, so I started sending out mental vibes to any of Officer Friendly’s country cousins who happened to be in the area, begging them to drive by and bust this guy.

Well, of course that didn’t happen. But who did drive by, a few minutes later, was the family in the RV. And no sooner had they passed the school than the van’s taillights finally winked out; the janitor pulled onto the highway right behind the RV and started following it.

Was that when you began to suspect that the janitor was the Angel of Death?

No. The guy was a creep, obviously, but at that point I was still thinking voyeur, not psycho killer. I figured he was tailing them because he wanted to whack off some more—or maybe he was hoping to steal some panties, or a chew toy.

Then the next morning, I went out to catch my ride and Señor Diaz was driving the car, which had never happened before.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Is it the Rapture?”

“The death angel,” said Carlotta. “He grabbed another kid yesterday, right outside Modesto.”

Modesto was north, the same direction the RV had been headed. That should have been enough to start me thinking, but the lightbulb didn’t go on until Carlotta said: “Get this. He didn’t just take the kid this time. He killed the kid’s dog, too.”